Star Wars: The Card Game – Studying The Force: The Emperors Web

Andrew Lawrence

Andrew Lawrence5:23 amFebruary 21st, 2017

Star Wars: The Card Game – Studying The Force: The Emperors Web

Welcome to the first in a new series of articles about Star Wars: the Card Game. For those of you who read the articles we write about other LCG’s you’ll be familiar with the card of the week, or highlighted card formats we use all the time.

That doesn’t really work for Star Wars: the Card Game because you don’t choose to make your deck out of individual cards like you do for the other LCG’s. You choose objective sets that are made up of 6 cards, one Objective card and 5 cards that go to make up your main deck.

So for that reason I will be featuring a full objective set and trying to explain why I think the set is good, what each card brings to the game, and if its worth including one or two copies of the objective sets in your deck, depending upon what it is that you’re trying to achieve.

You might expect me to start at the beginning and look at the objective sets from number 1 onwards… but that would be boring and predictable, so instead I thought I would kick off with a look an objective set that features one of the most feared and hated men in the Galaxy…Emperor Palpatine!

The Objective set is number 23 and is for Dark Side Players only.

The Emperor’s Web

This Objective is a good if you are planning to run heavily in the Sith faction. The ability on the card is great if you are going to have multiple events in hand that you are actually want to play as The Emperor’s Web allows you to reduce the cost of the first event you play each turn by one. At face value that’s pretty good, but it get slightly better when you realize its per turn, so that’s your turn and your opponent’s turn. That’s reducing the cost of two Sith events.

You’ll see why this is good when we look at the events that are actually included in this Objective set.

In any game cost reduction is often key to getting cards played and the more cards you can play, the better your chance of winning. An Objective that allows you to do this on both you and your opponent’s turn is worth including in my opinion. The down side to the Objective is that it has low health and only generates one resource, but with its reduction ability it is still a solid choice.

Emperor Palpatine

Well Hello Dolly! What a doozy of a card. He’s a monster, and quite rightly so, he is Emperor of THE Galactic Empire…

Emperor Palpatine has a serious amount of combat icons, the two stun icons and one objective damage icon are good enough, but if you manage to win the edge battle he gains another stun and objective damage icon. That can really mess with your opponent’s turn if you activate him first.

He has some serious force icons (count all five of those little grey dots!) which make him both useful for an eye battle if you can’t protect him on the table, or makes him a shoe-in for being committed to the force, which is ok to do since he is an Elite unit. So, assuming that he doesn’t get any stun token put on him during the course of the turn, you’ll activate him every turn!

He is a relatively weak unit with a damage capacity of only 3 and he is one of the most expensive units in the Core Set, at a whopping 6 Cost.

But, his Reaction ability coupled with the Objective ability make the two a force to be reckoned with.

You have to be careful when you play him. If you can’t protect him he’s a waste of resources getting him on the table, but if you have a good defensive wall out, get him down on the table and dish out the force lightning!

Emperor’s Royal Guard

As you might expect, this card helps to protect the Emperor from the rebel scum.

They are cheap at two resources, and are fairly robust with a damage capacity of three, but what makes them really great is their Protect Character ability. This basically allows you to transfer the damage dealt to another character to them. Looks like we just gave old Palpy a gigantic health boost!

They are fairly descent in combat themselves with one unit damage, and with an edge enabled unit damage they can dish it out almost as well as they can take it. They also have two force icons making them a good choice for force committal as they don’t need to participate to activate their ability.

Sith Library

There is not much to say about this one. It’s a resource generator which pays for itself as it goes down! This re-generation helps to make up for the lack of resources on the objective card itself. Some people will see this as a bit of a useless card as it doesn’t have any force icons – making it useless in an edge battle.. or does it?

Considering that you put cards face down in an edge battle, this is the perfect card to bluff your opponent with in order to get them to waste better cards in trying to to beat you in the edge battle! Is that a game winning tactic? No, I don’t think so, but it does work and can make your Sith Library a useful tool!

Force Lightning

Now this is the card you look for in a set that has old sparky himself in it! Force lightning has to be the coolest thing about being a Dark Side Force user. It’s featured in one of the most iconic scenes in the films, and it’s also what causes Palpatine to look like an old man’s Sac de Magic…

In game terms, this is the card you want cycling around to make the most out of in this objective set.

Let’s break this one down properly, shall we? The objective allow you to reduce the cost of this card by 1, which makes Force Lightning an extremely effective character killer. You can also use Emperor Palpatine to attack and exhaust two, if not three, characters of your choice, depending upon the edge battle report.

You can also use Palaptine’s ability to bring it back out of the discard pile and play it again, at a reduced cost of two in your opponent’s turn to either eliminate someone he has attacked you with, or one of the other poor unfortunate souls who suffered the wrath of the Emperor on the turn beforehand.

Perfect!

Force Choke

Now that’s a surprise – another Sith event to use and abuse with the Palpatine/Emperor’s Web combo! This one is in some ways better than Force Lightning, but in some ways worse.

Force Choke has a once per turn limit on it, so you have to spread the damage across multiple turns. I assume this is to stop it being broken and over-powered, as it has an amazing cost of zero.

That’s right, you can force choke people for free!

You can use this card to either finish someone off after a combat, remove a lil’ chump 1-health blocker so you get an undefended extra objective damage to snipe one out, or to be generally annoying and make your opponent think twice about blocking with an important character.

And to be fair there are loads if 1-health characters knocking around in other objective sets, which makes this worth having!

Well, thats all the cards in the objective set. What do I think of the set as a whole?

I like it. I personally would run two of these objective sets in a Sith deck. Two Force Lightnings and Force Chokes are invaluable, Palpatine is great either in play, on the table, or in an edge battle. Although the Objective isn’t the best out there, it’s still solid enough to help you towards a victory.